Unicorns season: Prince of Persia for the A8!

[Fred_M]

11 hours ago, rensoup said:

The box is alright but nothing special, I would go for the old Atari look from the early 80s...

 

That is probably because I preserve and collect commercial software releases. If Broderbund had decided to release Prince of Persia themselves for the Atari 8-bit in the 80s it would probably have had a similar design. When you look at the boxes of a.o. Karateka and Lode Runner, they were nothing special too 

 

It is all about personal preferences ? 

[Level42]

1 hour ago, Fred_M said:

 

That is probably because I preserve and collect commercial software releases. If Broderbund had decided to release Prince of Persia themselves for the Atari 8-bit in the 80s it would probably have had a similar design. When you look at the boxes of a.o. Karateka and Lode Runner, they were nothing special too 

 

It is all about personal preferences ? 

I agree. This would have been a Brøderbund release and not an Atari release. Historically your artwork comes closest to what it would have been originally.

 

Also the XEGS style of cartridge is completely wrong since a XEGS has only 64kB and PoP requires 128kB……(and don’t start me about the black cartridges with XEGS labels….)

but whatever makes people happy is simply fine…..I don’t mind running it from my SIDE3 either…..

 

 

 

 

Edited November 7, 2021 by Level42

[madness77]

@Mq. I wonder if your / @electrotrains cartridge design could be suitlable for PoP ?

 

 

[Fred_M]

49 minutes ago, Level42 said:

Also the XEGS style of cartridge is completely wrong since a XEGS has only 64kB and PoP requires 128kB……(and don’t stat me about the black cartridges with XEGS labels….)

 

 

Even Atari themselves made those ? ? ?

 

[Sleepy]

Then my PoP-cart looks more real than I thought... I never have seen a brown XE-cart before... :-)

Edited November 7, 2021 by Sleepy

[+MrFish]

2 hours ago, Fred_M said:

If Broderbund had decided to release Prince of Persia themselves for the Atari 8-bit in the 80s...

This is so out of the realm of possibility it's not even funny.

 

No ports of the Apple original were even done in the 80's; it wasn't released on the Apple until late 1989. The majority of ports were done between 1990 and 1994. So, nobody got a port of it in the 80's.

 

Now, you can add to that, the last releases Broderbund did for the Atari 8-bits were done in 1985 (Championship Lode Runner & Karateka; some nice parting gifts).

 

So, by the time 90's rolled around, the Atari 8-bits were the equivalent of dusty skeleton bones (or one of those tumbleweeds that roll around Texas and other dust bowl states) from a commercial standpoint, to any significant software publisher. The chances of anyone, with the power to do so, even pondering the Atari 8-bits as target for Prince of Persia were nigh microscopic.

 

[Note: I realise you were just speaking hypothetically; but the thought struck me as so humorous, I couldn't resist. No need to respond.  ]

 

[Fred_M]

8 minutes ago, MrFish said:

[Note: I realise you were just speaking hypothetically; but the thought struck me as so humorous, I couldn't resist. No need to respond.  ]

 

 

True ? But do know that "my" design of the box is based on the actual UK Domark release for the Atari ST ? 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 7, 2021 by Fred_M

[+MrFish]

1 minute ago, Fred_M said:

 

True ? But do know that "my" design of the box is based on the UK Domark release for the Atari ST ? 

 

 

Yeah, I'm not criticizing your choice, or even anything you're producing here. It's just that line about, "releasing Prince of Persia on the Atari 8-bits" that got me chuckling...

 

[Mq.]

1 hour ago, madness77 said:

@Mq. I wonder if your / @electrotrains cartridge design could be suitlable for PoP ?

 

 

Yes, that cartridge will work properly with PoP, but it is read-only cart, so you must program memory chip in the standalone eeprom programmer.

[+CharlieChaplin]

1 hour ago, MrFish said:

This is so out of the realm of possibility it's not even funny.

 

No ports of the Apple original were even done in the 80's; it wasn't released on the Apple until late 1989. The majority of ports were done between 1990 and 1994. So, nobody got a port of it in the 80's.

 

Now, you can add to that, the last releases Broderbund did for the Atari 8-bits were done in 1985 (Championship Lode Runner & Karateka; some nice parting gifts).

 

So, by the time 90's rolled around, the Atari 8-bits were the equivalent of dusty skeleton bones (or one of those tumbleweeds that roll around Texas and other dust bowl states) from a commercial standpoint, to any significant software publisher. The chances of anyone, with the power to do so, even pondering the Atari 8-bits as target for Prince of Persia were nigh microscopic.

 

[Note: I realise you were just speaking hypothetically; but the thought struck me as so humorous, I couldn't resist. No need to respond.  ]

 

 

Well, Atari Corp. did have a deal with Broderbund to re-release some of their old titles on XE/XEGS cart, like e.g. Karateka. Let's imagine for a moment these XE/XEGS carts would have sold extremely well and successfull (no way, I know, but let's do it for a yokto second, okay), then maybe, maybe they would have been thinking about releasing POP on a XE/XEGS cart also.

 

Back then Atari released only 32k, 64k and 128k XE/XEGS carts and they would have required a 256k cart for POP, but using a real cart. with its bank-switching technique (and not a disk converted to a cart.), I guess that 64k RAM would have been enough... but well, after all, we are talking about the Tramiels here, so that would never have worked or happened in reality.

 

[Mr Robot]

If it were an Atari release, maybe something like this. This is really 400/800 the XE boxes were less fun, I'll have a go at one of those when I have a little free time. 

[madness77]

2 hours ago, Mq. said:

Yes, that cartridge will work properly with PoP, but it is read-only cart, so you must program memory chip in the standalone eeprom programmer.

 

perfect

[Faicuai]

30 minutes ago, Mr Robot said:

If it were an Atari release, maybe something like this. This is really 400/800 the XE boxes were less fun, I'll have a go at one of those when I have a little free time. 

 

Pure class!!

 

All the stuff that I bought later just looked / felt half-cooked in comparison...

 

NICE !!

[rensoup]

9 hours ago, Fred_M said:

It is all about personal preferences ? 

Yes, I foresee another hundred page debate about everybody's own personal preferences ?

[rensoup]

3 hours ago, Mr Robot said:

If it were an Atari release, maybe something like this. This is really 400/800 the XE boxes were less fun, I'll have a go at one of those when I have a little free time. 

That is definitely a step in the right direction! Unmissably Atari ?

 

(something grittier may be more fitting)

 

I actually got my "Art of Atari" hardcopy, which DrVenkman mentioned earlier...

 

 

I'm hoping @superrune would like to get involved in this...

[rensoup]

Slightly related, there's a C64 demo with pictures of Atari 2600 game box covers:

 

 

Annoyingly these pictures are quite difficult to convert nicely on the A8!

[emkay]

10 minutes ago, rensoup said:

Slightly related, there's a C64 demo with pictures of Atari 2600 game box covers:

 

 

Annoyingly these pictures are quite difficult to convert nicely on the A8!

To be honest. The pictures were not pictures of the game boxes. There is a lot missing. 

Also interesting. This demo shows that SID isn't well for all types of music

Trying do convert the original images with Rastaconverter could be interesing. 

Or using your tool with precalculated images of the boxes to fit to the Atari's graphics. 

Edited November 7, 2021 by emkay

[+DrVenkman]

1 hour ago, rensoup said:

Yes, I foresee another hundred page debate about everybody's own personal preferences 

Welcome to the Internet! Have you heard of something called "discussion forums?"  

 

If you don't want people talking, you gotta go old school and just upload your warez to a BBS for people to download without talking about every tiny bit of everything involved ... 

[leech]

Hmm, so I've been attempting to get this working with Mame, but unfortunately I have yet to dig deep enough to see if you can run mame Atari 8bit emulation with 128kb of ram.  When I try 'mame a130xe' it says the emulation is broken.  The others seem to all say there are some graphical issues.

 

My reason for doing so... I wanted to try out Prince of Persia on the Atari VCS

[Faicuai]

45 minutes ago, DrVenkman said:

Have you heard of something called "discussion forums?"

"Discussion" has never been synonymous of "bullshit", if that is what you mean.

 

Nothing wrong with boldly emphasizing such difference...

[rensoup]

1 hour ago, emkay said:

To be honest. The pictures were not pictures of the game boxes. There is a lot missing. 

Also interesting. This demo shows that SID isn't well for all types of music

Trying do convert the original images with Rastaconverter could be interesing. 

Or using your tool with precalculated images of the boxes to fit to the Atari's graphics. 

They're still pretty good even if you won't admit it ?

 

I did try to convert some of them to the A8 but there were too many colors per line but yeah a custom conversion for the A8 may have worked better.

[+MrFish]

7 hours ago, CharlieChaplin said:

Well, Atari Corp. did have a deal with Broderbund to re-release some of their old titles on XE/XEGS cart, like e.g. Karateka. Let's imagine for a moment these XE/XEGS carts would have sold extremely well and successfull (no way, I know, but let's do it for a yokto second, okay), then maybe, maybe they would have been thinking about releasing POP on a XE/XEGS cart also.

 

Back then Atari released only 32k, 64k and 128k XE/XEGS carts and they would have required a 256k cart for POP, but using a real cart. with its bank-switching technique (and not a disk converted to a cart.), I guess that 64k RAM would have been enough... but well, after all, we are talking about the Tramiels here, so that would never have worked or happened in reality.

 

("Yocto"... isn't that one of the enemies in Bruce Lee?)

 

If you're a betting man, you'd go with the C64 or ZX getting a port (well, the ZX basically got one in 1996, but not an official port); but alas, our friendly C64 neighbors didn't even get one; so, how much less the Atari 8-bits? The Amstrad CPC got one in 1991 -- in spite of the fact that the machine was discontinued in 1990; but then they also got an impressive array of other modern ports (in comparison to the Atari 8-bits library). So, I guess it was a pretty successful and worthy machine (in spite of lacking some hardware support for graphics, and it's penchant for displaying as many eye-raping reds as possible in some games).

 

"Let's imagine"... frankly, I hear a lot of imagining every time I come on Atariage ("what if Atari had done this", "what if the Tramiels hadn't done that"); and I find it one of the most boring practices littering the landscape here. I prefer to look at what has been done, or what can be done now.

 

[rensoup]

1 hour ago, DrVenkman said:

Welcome to the Internet! Have you heard of something called "discussion forums?"  

 

"discussion" ?

 

In this thread ?? 

 

There's about 80 pages from a handful of people rebashing stuff. It may look like a discussion if you skip 9 posts out of 10 ( only slightly exagerating... )

[rensoup]

10 minutes ago, MrFish said:

I prefer to look at what has been done, or what can be done now.

 

Is it a good time to mention that PoP background tileset ??

[rensoup]

Random question: a 64KB version would require to leave most of the game uncompressed on a cart, which would double the ROM space requirements(512KB). Is ROM cost very different depending on the size ?